Time travel is not an underused concept in anime. Multiple shows and films have tried to pull it off to differing degrees of success. Series likeErasedandTokyo Revengersand films likeYour NameandThe Girl Who Leapt Through Timeare some well-known examples. More often than not, the ability to time travel in anime is a tool for characters to reach the necessary plot points, and in most cases that is, like a soft magic system, left largely unexplained. When involving this particular narrative device, it is easy for a story to risk being punctured by inconsistencies and paradoxes if not meticulously thought through. Among all the Japanese aime titles that feature time traveling, one stands out among them as the quintessential paragon of the subgenre:Steins;Gate.
No anime has as successfully and thoroughly weaved time travel into its plot. Watching the 2011 anime adaptation by White Fox Studio, or playing the 2009 visual novel that inspired it, is guaranteed to blow one’s mind. InSteins;Gate, time travel is not simply one of many elements that make up its plot, instead, understanding the act of jumping to the past and its ramifications is at the core of the story.Steins;Gategoes above and beyond to fill in as many loopholes as it can while laying out the inner workings of the time-travel theories it is based upon. These are a combination of the butterfly effect theory, the many-worlds interpretation theory, and the black hole theory. Hence, it distinguishes itself from other series likeErasedandTokyo Revengers, wherein the protagonist’s ability to leap back to the past is purposefully ambiguous with no real-life theory to base it upon.
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In addition to its theories,Steins;Gateincorporates multiple elements of popular culture. One of the most relevant to the overall story is the self-proclaimed time traveler John Titor’s unbelievable claims that circulated the internet in the year 2000. The extensive worldbuilding details are a testament to the painstaking research the creative teams from 5pb. and Nitroplus conducted in order to design this intricate narrative. All these particularities serve to fill the story with depth, which makes it, in spite of its science-fiction nature, incredibly plausible.
Quite often, time-traveling stories are permeated with holes that we must ignore for the sake of suspending our disbelief.Steins;Gatedoes not count on the viewers’ suspension of disbelief to carry them mindlessly through the sci-fi elements, on the contrary, it minimizes this disbelief because it does not shy away from the complexities of writing about time travel. Although the visual novel, due to its inherent characteristics, is able to go into far more detail and explore its topics more in-depth, the White Fox adaptation remained sufficiently faithful to the source material while making the heaps of dense information easily digestible to viewers.
In this way,Steins;Gatemanages to bypass the possible problems with the density of its subject matter, which is precisely why the series appears slow to pick up the pace. If there is one fair criticism to have of the anime is that it has a slow start, slower than usual for the medium. But that does not mean that nothing happens, on the contrary, a lot happens in each episode, the difference is that the actions taken in the first couple of episodes only get their full blow back almost halfway through the series.Steins;Gatetakes its time to develop the characters, their relationships, the setting, and gradually lays out the foundation that will lead to the chain of mind-boggling plot twists that are thrown at us later on. But above all else, one aspect that speaks to the brilliance ofSteins;Gateis its thematic consistency, which also translates itself into the character arcs that unfold before our eyes.
Rintaro Okabe’s (Mamoru Miyano) experience mirrors the viewers’ in the way in which he goes from being heedlessly complacent to being hit with the consequences of his meddling with time, to becoming serious in the pursuit of ascertaining the steps required to fix them. We, too, realize just how much of a pickle the lab members are in when the possibility of imprisonment and even death suddenly stare them in the face. The wish to amend past mistakes and unfortunate events is something very human and that makes it so that we empathize with Okabe’s actions as he, unaware of the impending fallout, uses Future Gadget No. 8, the PhoneWave (Name subject to change), to change the past according to his friends’ wishes. However, this sends him to the Alpha Worldline, an attractor field in which not only does his childhood friend Mayuri Shiina (Kana Hanazawa) die no matter what, due to her demise being the converging point, but it also leads to a bleak future dystopia.Steins;Gateconfronts both the protagonist and the viewers with the repercussions of having the power to mess with the past.
On a larger scale, the credible sci-fi elements allude to present-day “what ifs” that stimulate our critical thinking over the subject.Steins;Gatedistinguishes itself from the other anime titles mentioned in this article because it is not afraid to dig deep into this complicated subject while raising hefty questions associated with the aftereffects of tampering with time. AlthoughThe Girl Who Leapt Through Timealso deals with the desire to shape the past to our liking and the unforeseen consequences of doing so, it does so from a non-scientific perspective that does not make as poignant a point asSteins;Gate.
The use of time travel inSteins;Gateis not the constant Deus Ex-Machina that is there to aid the protagonist reach their desirable reality, like inErasedorTokyo Revengers, or exists mostly for the sake of the central plot twist, like inYour Name. Instead, it ties into all elements of the narrative. Starting on Episode 12 and due to his interfering with the past, Rintaro is sent through a series of traumatic events that follow aGroundhog Dayloop that only he remembers thanks to his Reading Steiner ability or, in common terms, what we can understand to be a ripple effect-proof memory. Thus, the plot follows a deconstruction of the trope Set Right What Once Went Wrong. UnlikeTokyo RevengersandErasedwherein the protagonist must find the solution in the past to amend the present, Rintaro is both the cause and the solution for most of the mistakes made throughout the series, all the while being faced with an inescapable moral dilemma that challenges his scientific idealism.
On top of being a gripping journey that fully takes off halfway through the series,Steins;Gatecloses its story with a near-perfect ending. First, the ending is the beginning. This revelation alone is astonishing enough but for it to work,Steins;Gateincorporated the bootstrap paradox into its plot. However, because time travel inSteins;Gatecomprises the many-worlds interpretation theory, the series is capable of avoiding inconsistency by finding a loophole in the seemingly closed loop which in turn leads to the true ending of the visual novel and the only ending of the anime.
In both mediums, Rintaro manages to find the desirable world line, “Steins Gate”, when he tricks out time by making it appear like Kurisu Makise (Asami Imai) was murdered, so his past self would unwittingly be guided to follow on the events of the beginning creating a perfect loop with one perfect resolution. And thus, past and future Rintaro together achieve the ideal divergence number of 1.048596, rewarding him and us viewers with a deserved happy ending after all the heartache. The follow-upSteins;Gate 0, builds upon this ending but what makes it so unique is that it does not do so as a sequel. It covers some of the holes its predecessor left open, giving viewers the context as to how Beta-worldline Rintaro managed to reach the solution to “Steins Gate”, and for that alone, it is worthy of mention.
InSteins;Gate, every step and misstep taken along the way was meaningful, which speaks volumes about how well-thought-out the plot is. Admittedly, the science behind the series has its issues. A scientist with a comprehensive understanding of quantum mechanics would be able to tell exactly in which ways it is flawed. At the end of the day, it is fictionalized science, we need to suspend our disbelief and accept, for instance, that a microwave can somehow become a time machine. Nonetheless,Steins;Gategoes to commendable lengths to seem plausible in its implausibility.
What truly makes it stand out amongst other titles of the same subgenre of sci-fi, is its airtight thematic cohesion. Compared to other anime that only use time travel as a device to get from one plot point to another, the series is concerned with the essence of time itself and speculates what would happen if the power to bend it fell into human hands. This is perfectly embodied in Rintaro’s character arc which also corresponds to the main moral lesson of the series: Trying to reject the past and live without consequences is impossible, whereas, the future is unknowable and therefore full of possibility. We draft our own path, it’s up to us to find the route to “Steins Gate” in our present reality.
